The first edition of this book formed the basis of the modern approach to Elizabethan poetic drama as a performing art, an approach pursued in subsequent volumes by Professor Bradbrook. Its influence has also extended to other fields; it has been studied by Grigori Kozintsev and Sergei Eisenstein for instance. Conventions of open stage, stylized plot and characters, and actors' traditions of presentation are realted to the special expectations which a rhetorical training produced in the listeners. The general discussion of tragic conventions is followed by individual studies of how these were used by Marlowe, Tourneur, Webster and Middleton. For this second edition, Professor Bradbrook has revised her material and written a new introduction. A new final chapter on performance and characterization describes the conventions of role-playing. Dramatists before and after Shakespeare are compared with him in their methods of showing a complex identity on stage. This chapter also considers the work of Marston, Chapman and Ford in relation to the themes and conventions studied in earlier chapters.

The plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are increasingly popular thanks to a spate of recent stage and screen productions and to courses that set Shakespeare's plays in context. This Reader's Guide introduces students to the criticism and debates that are specific to the drama of playwrights such as Jonson, Middleton, Dekker and Webster. Pascale Aebischer explores recent critical developments in key areas including: - How the plays were staged and printed - Innovative editions of plays - How the plays represent and contest the dominant ideologies of the Jacobean period - Dramatic genres - The representation of the human body and of social, gender and race relations - Modern productions on stage and screen Featuring suggestions for further research and reading, and a filmography of commercially available film versions of non-Shakespearean drama, this is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the diverse plays of the Jacobean age.

Cover -- Half Title Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- 2017 Reprint Acknowledgement -- Original Title Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Dedication Page -- Contents -- General Editor's Preface -- Prefatory Note -- 1 Some Definitions and Observations -- 2 Tragedy in Practice and in Theory -- 3 The Tragic Hero -- 4 Cleansing? or Sacrifice? -- 5 The Sense of Balance -- 6 Peripeteia, Anagnorisis, Suffering -- 7 The Chorus and the Unities -- 8 The Sense of Overdoing It -- Select Bibliography -- Index

First published in English in 1961, this reissue relates the problems of form and style to the development of dramatic speech in pre-Shakespearean tragedy. The work offers positive standards by which to assess the development of pre-Shakespearean drama and, by tracing certain characteristics in Elizabethan tragedy which were to have a bearing on Shakespeare’s dramatic technique, helps to illuminate the foundations on which Shakespeare built his dramatic oeuvre.

This work attempts to analyze Shakespeare's tragedies, concentrating on the accidental irregularities and the inspired "unconformities" to the found there. The aim is to understand Shakespeare's mind and craft by an interpretion of the plays to see what problems of consistency they present.

A comprehensive introduction to Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women - introducing its critical history, performance history, the current critical landscape and new directions in research.